Oct. 10, 2025
MAP’s Navigator program pairs hospital patients who are homeless with an outreach counsellor – a ‘Navigator’ – who gets to know the patient and helps them plan for discharge.
Where will the patient live after they leave the hospital? How will they manage medications, and get to follow-up appointments?
These questions can be complex, but the Navigator walks alongside the patient to sort through the answers – both while they’re in hospital and in the months following. The goals are to better support unhoused patients as they recover from hospitalization, connect them with healthcare and social services in the community, and ultimately, to help people exit homelessness for good.
MAP designed and launched the Navigator Program as a St. Michael’s Hospital pilot in 2019. As the program grew, the positive impact on St. Michael’s patients – and their care teams – was clear. That’s why MAP and Staples Canada, through our Even the Odds partnership, expanded Navigator to St. Paul’s Hospital (Vancouver) in 2023 followed by Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) in 2025.
Across all sites, the Navigator program has now served more than 1,000 patients.
To mark World Homeless Day on Oct. 10, we talked with Dr. Anita Palepu at St. Paul’s about the program’s impact so far.
“When MAP and Staples approached us to see if Navigator might be feasible at St. Paul’s, it was clear that the program was a perfect fit. We serve many people who are vulnerably housed or homeless, many of whom have complex medical issues. We were experiencing all the same challenges that St. Michael’s had experienced.
Hospitals are always working at full capacity. When people don’t need acute hospital care anymore, we must discharge them to make the bed available for people who are sicker. But for our unhoused patients, that often meant we had to send people straight from the hospital to a shelter, or even to the street because the shelters were full. It was a huge gap in care, and often people ended up right back in hospital. It’s a really difficult cycle to break.
The support from Even the Odds meant we could hire Alex, our new ‘Navigator’, in this very specific role. MAP supported us in designing and adapting the program for our hospital. We went for site visits and got to know how the program worked in Toronto. We are still in close contact, sharing our learnings back and forth. Our whole team – our program directors, nurses, social workers, and all our allied team – have all been extremely enthusiastic, because we all saw the need, and now we are seeing the successes as well.
Just like at St. Michael’s, our unhoused patients are both medically and socially complex. Many are living with a really challenging combination of poverty, isolation, serious mental health disorders and substance use. Without shelter and support, people age rapidly, and die early.
I wish we could solve the more structural issues in our society that would prevent this from happening to people. But thanks to Staples, MAP and the Navigator program, we can now care for them the best we can, with all the levers we have access to.
We are incredibly grateful for Staples’ generosity and ongoing support. It means a lot that they believed in the program and wanted to see it expand. It’s all been a really wonderful experience for St. Paul’s.”